166-million-year-old dinosaur footprints unearthed in astonishing Oxfordshire quarry find

The UK’s largest dinosaur trackway has been uncovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire, revealing a fascinating glimpse into the Jurassic past.

Transcript

00:00In June 2024, we uncovered around 200 dinosaur tracks. We found four long trackways up to

00:20150 metres long from sauropod dinosaurs. So these are long-necked, four-legged herbivorous

00:25dinosaurs, so probably something like a Cetiosaurus, so about 18 metres in length, about 10 tonnes.

00:32And then we found one theropod track. And the theropod track is probably from Megalosaurus,

00:36so this is probably a very fearsome mid-Jurassic predator. It's a carnivorous dinosaur and

00:42it leaves these very distinctive three-toed tracks behind in the sediment. Very classic,

00:47what you would expect a footprint to look like, with a little claw mark in some cases.

00:54Tracks give us that moment in time in the life of that animal, right? It tells us it

00:58was there, unlike a body fossil that could be moved around. So it gives us that glimpse

01:02into what they were doing, but we can also figure out how big they were, how fast they

01:06were moving, how they were interacting with each other, with the environment. So there's

01:11lots of additional information that one can get from looking at tracks that you can't

01:14get from looking at body fossils, so it's a really interesting complement.